"I'm her," Amy said. "You can stop bringing in the others, now."
Dr Singh smiled ruefully. "Sorry, but I'm afraid we have to keep going. We have to make sure the error hasn't replicated elsewhere."
It made sense. Amy had no idea why Portia and her mother had malfunctioned, or how the flaw was passed down. Maybe it had happened to other vN, too. "But doesn't that mean you should be checking all vN?" she asked.
Dr Singh rested one leg on a table behind him. They were in a windowless room with a projector in the ceiling. Old plastic chairs were stacked in one corner, and on the right wall beside the door hung a smart scroll, currently grey and silent. On the left wall hung a large mirror. In it, Amy saw herself cocooned in the Cuddlebug's gleaming web.
"This room used to be for focus groups," Dr Singh said. "That's not really a mirror. We're being watched."
Amy nodded. "Hi," she said to her reflection. She turned back to Dr Singh. "Can I see my mom, now?"
He fiddled with his cuffs. He wore a very nice pink checked shirt, with camel-coloured trousers and navy blue deck shoes. He didn't really look like a scientist – no white lab coat, no goggles, no crazy hair. But he was studying her very carefully, in a way that indicated it was his job to do so, and that he was paid handsomely for it.
"I'm going to be straight with you, Amy," Dr Singh said. "You're never going to get out of here. Neither is your mother. You're both going to spend the rest of your lives here. The sooner you start making the best of that, the better off you'll be."
"Can my dad come and see us?"
He shrugged. "I'll be honest. I don't know. If it's any consolation, I know there are other human partners out there who are trying hard to make that happen. We've gotten mock-ups for what we're jokingly referring to as the Stepford solution. It's sort of like a village. Where mixed couples could go live. But they'd have to sign an agreement… I mean, the surveillance…" He waved one hand dismissively. "That's not my department. We have Legal for that."
Amy nodded. Once, she would have found the challenge of designing a whole neighbourhood for vN and humans to live together interesting. Now, she found it difficult to care about anything so theoretical. "What about Javier?"
"He's being debriefed as we speak. That means he's answering questions about you."
"And Junior?" she asked.
"Junior?"
"The baby."
"The bluescreen? He's fine. He's in the support queue." Dr Singh levered the rest of himself up on the table. He swung his legs. "You haven't asked about yourself, yet."
It was hard to shrug when her arms were so tightly restrained. "Can you take Portia out of me?"
Dr Singh looked at the mirror. "Is Portia listening to us right now?"
"She's always listening."
"Does she want to come out?"
"She always wants to come out."
"And you're burning cycles just keeping her inside?"
Amy nodded. "She's like a background process that takes up a really big footprint."
Dr Singh looked back at her. "Well, Amy, I'm glad you're here. We're going to take good care of you, and we'll see what we can do about your… I don't know what to call it. Condition? Inhabitation?" He smiled and made the sign of the cross in the air. "The power of Christ compels you!"
"I'm an atheist," Amy said.
"It was worth a try."
"Quit making jokes and bring me my daughter, you walking sack of shit," Portia said, with Amy's mouth. "Now."
Dr Singh stood up so fast the table fell over. He swallowed, inhaled deeply through his nose, flexed his fingers, and made for the door. He said nothing to Amy as he shut it. A second later, she heard something very heavy slide into place. Then the room plunged into total darkness.
"I'm sorry, Amy." Dr Singh's voice emitted from a speaker embedded in some surface of the room. "We'll figure out what do with you, soon."
Figuring out what to do with Amy apparently meant keeping her in the Cuddlebug indefinitely, and introducing her to other members of the team one at a time: Dr Casaubon, the semiotician and natural language specialist from Italy; Dr Kamiyama, the vN API whiz from Tokyo; Dr Arminius, the failsafe expert on loan from MIT. They'd been granted emergency funds from DARPA, Dr Singh said, and their job was to write up a report on the situation from an independent perspective.
FEMA had assumed control of this portion of the campus. They were making it secure, so research could proceed with minimal risk to the surrounding community. The regular employees were furious, but they were "working closely" with Dr Singh and his team. Everyone on the team was visibly nervous, and all of them had the habit of politely introducing themselves to Amy, and then speaking to Dr Singh as though she were no longer in the room. They dressed casually. With the exception of Dr Kamiyama, they were never without a thermal mug of coffee. Over the next two days, they visited her at irregular intervals. Amy sensed that they kept odd hours, and were constantly busy. They didn't look like they had slept very much in the last little while.
Dr Arminius spent the most time with her, at first. She was in charge of verifying Amy's identity. She started out with questions only Amy could answer: things about her home, her family, her school.
"Are you checking these against my mom's answers?" Amy thought to ask, after the third question.
"Yes."
"Is my mom OK?"
"She's fine."
"When can I see her?"
"When we decide it's safe." She tilted her head. "The last time your mother and grandmother were in the same room together, your mother almost died. Do you want that to happen again?"
Dr Arminius was also in charge of assessing Amy's failsafe. She showed Amy a lot of violent content, the sort of stuff that usually came with a clockwork eye logo warning vN not to watch it. Amy hadn't watched any of it until now, she told the doctor. Her parents wouldn't let her.
"Were they afraid you would failsafe?" Dr Arminius asked.
"Of course!"
"So your failsafe worked properly until after you internalized Portia?"
Amy hadn't yet considered that particular question. If her failsafe were broken all that time, how would have she known? She had always stayed away from violence, or depictions of violence, until the night Portia arrived. Her parents had made certain of that. But when she remembered Javier's face staring at Harold, that empty-eyed joy, she wondered. She couldn't remember looking at a human being that way. Her mother had never looked at her father that way. And now Amy knew why.
Your mother was never in love with your father. She tolerated him, and she used him to give you a home. But your little family was all a lie.
Amy tried not to listen. She tried to answer as honestly as possible. "I think it was intact. I didn't hurt anybody. You can check my school records."
Dr Arminius smiled. "I already have. But whether or not you reacted aggressively isn't what concerns me. What concerns me is whether you see violence as a solution to a problem."
Amy thought of Harold, and the way his wrists had trembled in her hands. She hadn't wanted to hurt him. Not really. At least, she wouldn't have enjoyed it. "Violence never solves anything."
"Are you saying that because you think it's true, or because it's what you learned in school?"
"Why would they teach it in school if it weren't true?"
Dr Arminius smoothed her reader across her knee. She was a tall, angular woman with pronounced freckles and sooty lashes. She wore canvas shoes the colour of cream cheese mints. "You seem like a smart girl, Amy. Would you use that word to describe yourself?"
"I'm smart compared to the human kids in my class," Amy said. "I'm not sure how I compare to other vN."
If you were smart, you wouldn't be here.
"Is something bothering you?"
"Portia says that if I were smart, I wouldn't have let myself get caught."
"Is Portia smart?"
Amy frowned at her tone. She sounded a lot like Mrs Pratt did when they did a whole lesson o
n imaginary friends. And Portia was neither imaginary nor a friend. "I don't know," she said. "I think she thinks she is. But I don't think she knows how to build anything, or how to live with other people."
I don't need other people. I don't even need Charlotte, any more. And all I need you for is this body.
"Is she speaking to you right now, Amy?"
Amy nodded.
"Does she tell you to do things?"
"All the time." A moment too late, Amy realized where the question was headed. "But I don't do what she says. When I'm in control, I make the decisions. When she's in control, I have to fight her. That's why I had to grab the fence at the garbage dump. To distract her, and get the control back."
Dr Arminius uncrossed her legs and stood. She noted something on her reader. "He'll be happy to know that."
"Who?"
"Javier. He keeps talking about that fence. When we show him the video of you grabbing it, he has a very intense reaction. Phobic, almost."
"I guess you should stop showing it to him, then."
Dr Arminius caught her gaze. "That sounds like a threat, Amy."
It's just some friendly advice.
"It's just some friendly advice."
• • • •
After that, the PhDs prescribed a regimen of game therapy. They had her old gaming stats, in addition to her preschool and kindergarten records. They would use them for comparison, to analyze any changes in her decision-making process since consuming Portia. Luckily, this meant finally leaving the Cuddlebug. Unluckily, there was no shower. Amy could only give herself a wipedown with wetnaps while a small cleaner bot named BOB, adorned with a smiley face and repurposed for surveillance, looked on.
It should be easy to break out of this place, once the opportunity comes.
The games were full-body, but didn't come with any of the usual haptic bangles that she was used to playing with. Instead, they gave her a special suit to wear for gameplay. It was the same green as the vN prison jumpsuits, but made of a stretchy material that was too clingy to be comfortable. It would measure which parts of her lit up at what times.
"It's based on old mocap technology," Dr Singh said, as though that were supposed to explain things. "That's why it's green."
The games themselves were basic: they didn't want to clog her systems (and therefore their readings) with too much sensory stimuli. Most of them were puzzles. In one, she had to align a series of colour-coded boxes outfitted with holes so that they formed a tunnel for a cat to cross somebody's backyard without getting rained on. (Amy had a lot of questions about this premise, none of which were answered.) Some boxes only had a single hole that aimed right or left, some boxes had two, and once in a while you scored an extra one with three. You had to build the route around things like decorative rocks or patio furniture. The more boxes you used to create the tunnel, the more points you lost. During the timed trial version, a dog got loose in the tunnel and you had to give the cat room to run before he got her. The dog was obviously automated, though, so Amy didn't worry about it very much.
Then the game introduced another character, the next-door neighbour. The neighbour wanted to steal the cat, and was building his own tunnel to lure the cat into his own backyard. He had special boxes with food in them that would tempt her into his maze. A real person was obviously playing the neighbour; he kept making weird, incomprehensible mistakes and just sitting back to watch them happen. He moved the boxes lazily at first, and he let Amy win a bunch of times. Eventually, he improved. He just started copying everything Amy did. Then he did it much faster, and started grabbing all the good boxes before she could get to them, and lining up tripletunnel scores so he could get extra boxes and create mazes for the dog to lose himself in.
It was at this point that Amy realized that the dog was her best ally in the game. He would always chase the cat back into her yard but never the neighbour's. She just had to keep him on task. This meant keeping him within one box of the cat at all times. She had to deliberately slow down her gameplay, grab only the single-entry boxes, and lead the two of them straight home. It felt like relearning the whole game over again, but it worked. The third time it happened, the neighbour just gave up halfway through.
"Sore loser," Amy said.
"You have no idea." Dr Kamiyama entered the room as the lights rose and the projection faded. He carried a huge pouch of cold barley tea that he siphoned through a slender tube. Amy had never seen him without it. "Say you were back in your old life. Would you ever play a game with that player again?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"He's inexperienced, and gets frustrated too quickly. It's like he's never played a game before."
Dr Kamiyama nodded. "What if I told you that you had just played against your clademates?"
"That would make sense. Portia kept them underground. There wasn't any electricity. No gaming."
The pouch crinkled in Dr Kamiyama's hand. "Pardon me, but could you please repeat that?"
"There wasn't–"
"The other thing!"
"She kept them underground." Amy frowned. "Didn't you know? Isn't that where you found them?"
"No," Portia said, with Amy's mouth. "These morons only found my search party. They have no idea how many we are."
The pouch dropped straight from Dr Kamiyama's trembling hand.
"Get this straight, you fucking chimp. My name is legion."
Amy now measured time in how often the members of the team changed their clothes. It wasn't the most precise measurement, but in the absence of windows or clocks it was what she had. By this count, she had spent roughly a week in Redmond. On the seventh day, Dr Singh put her halfway in the Cuddlebug, sat her at the table, and presented her with a huge, multi-course meal.
They're trying to make you iterate. They want to steal your baby and study it.
Examining the plates piled high with chunks of feedstock, Amy wondered if maybe that was in fact the case. Why else would they give her so much material to work with?
"What's all this?"
"Big day, today." Dr Singh handed her a thin pancake. Tiny flecks of carbon glittered in its surface. Utensils were out of the question. Dr Singh had suggested a vN variety of naan as a replacement. "You're going to be entering a deep game immersion. You won't eat for a few hours. So you'd better fuel up now."
Amy re-examined the plates. They were the smart kind; if she'd asked, they would have told her how many ounces she was eating from each. But she didn't need to ask.
"There's too much here," she said. "If I eat all this without having to repair myself, it'll trigger the iteration process." She leaned as far forward as the Cuddlebug would allow. "Will I have to repair myself?"
"No. It'll just wear you out, that's all."
"How do you know?"
"I've seen it happen." Dr Singh stood. "I thought you'd be happy with the spread. Your mother says you were never allowed to eat as much as you wanted. She says you were always hungry."
Amy shut her eyes. She was going to cry, and she didn't want Dr Singh or the others to see it. They'd seen so much, already. "Please let me see her," she said in her meekest voice. "Please."
"We'll see. For now, try to eat. You'll need your strength."
The immersion, they said, would help them take a picture of her memory structure. In order to be scanned properly, it had to be in use. Dr Casaubon had developed it over the past week, using existing game footage and the data gleaned from Amy's current gameplay patterns.
"With this, we learn more about your memory, and the nonna memory." Dr Casaubon was the only member of the team whose English wasn't quite right. "We bring the nonna out, but in a safe place."
The Cuddlebug had deposited her in a smaller room than usual. The walls were padded with sound-insulating foam. The projectors were new. Amy saw ragged edges of ceiling around their housings. The installers hadn't had time to make their work pretty.
"Nonna?" she asked.
"Portia. Tuo spi
rito familiare."
The speakers made him hard to hear. Amy couldn't see him. If they were watching her, it was via cameras. The room darkened. The projectors warmed up.
"We see what Portia see," he said. "We know what she know."
"Excuse me?"
"You drive car."
The room grew. Or rather, the projection deepened. It was stunning. Now Amy understood why the units needed to be new. She knew that the image of the maroon Jeep stretching around her was not real, but her systems registered the steering wheel and dashboard and two-lane blacktop spooling away from them as real data. The illusion probably wouldn't have fooled organic eyes, but for her it was seamless.
vN Page 17